What a project knows

Two versions within three days, 1.8 and 1.9, and both give a project something that until now only tasks had: a note and a deadline. Both times, the real work wasn’t storing it. It was deciding where you see it — and where you don’t.

A note on the project

Below a project’s name there’s now a faint “Notes” line. Tap it and start writing; links stay clickable. The first line shows up under the project in the overview, so you see it without opening anything.

The first version in the project header grew with every line, and after a longer paragraph there was barely anything left of the list below. Now the header shows at most three lines at rest and eight while you write, and anything beyond that scrolls inside the field.

On favourite tiles there’s a small rule: all or none. If one favourite has a note, every tile keeps the line free, even those without one. Otherwise two tiles in the same row would stand at different heights, and the grid would look like it had slipped.

A deadline for the whole thing

Tasks have had deadlines since August; projects didn’t. The request came from a user, and it makes sense: a house move has an end, but that end doesn’t belong to any single task in it. In the overview the deadline sits on the right of the row: grey while it’s far off, orange in the final week and red from the day itself. You get a notification a week before and on the day.

The week is fixed. For tasks you can set how early an approaching deadline stands out, three days by default. For a whole project that’s too short, and a second setting right next to it is one more thing to understand before it helps.

And what it deliberately doesn’t do

A project’s deadline isn’t passed down to its tasks. That would have been the obvious idea, and it would have done the opposite of what it promises: with twenty tasks red on the same day, none of them tells you which one is actually pressing. For the same reason it doesn’t pull anything into Today.

In Upcoming it appears on its day as a quiet line in the day header, not as a task among the others — it’s an end you want to keep in view, not something you check off. And typing “Move house by Nov 30” when you create a project gives you “Move house” with a deadline. Only a deadline gets read there; nothing else is taken out of the name.

Completed stays if you want it to

Hobba moves completed tasks to the Log — immediately, the next day or after a week, depending on your setting. One user asked for “Never”. The new option is called “Manually”, because the way to the Log is still there: completed tasks stay in their list until you clear them yourself with •••. “Never” wouldn’t quite have been honest.

And the keyboard

On the Mac and on iPad with a keyboard, ↑ and ↓ walk through the tasks of a list: ⏎ opens one, ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ move it, ⌫ deletes it. But the arrows only belong to Hobba while nothing is being typed. In a text field they keep moving the cursor, without anyone having to remember an exception.

And on the Mac, something works again that hadn’t for a while: trying to select text in an open task dragged the whole task along instead. With a mouse, a drag there starts without delay after a few points of movement — and selecting text takes exactly that much movement. So on the Mac, an open task is now a writing surface; you drag it once it’s closed.

Everything else from both versions is in the changelog.